The Book SharkIn Search of the Best Books of the Year2015-07-15T21:19:44Zhttp://thebookshark.com/feed/atom/WordPressCindyhttp://thebookshark.com/?p=42612015-06-26T19:19:51Z2015-06-26T19:19:51Z

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki. Penguin Books (2013), 432 pages.

Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was a finalist for the 2013 Booker prize. It has been praised in over thirty reviews from major newspapers and magazines as “masterful,” “exquisite,” “dazzling,” “harrowing,” etc. Readers who regularly scan the blurbs in the front pages of a paperback know not to take this sort of adulation seriously though. Lavishly extravagant adjectives have become so de rigueur in publishing that they are essentially meaningless.

Sometimes, however, in combination with other factors, I start to believe that maybe, this time, it’s true. Reviews and back copy for A Tale for the Time Being refer to a Japanese teenager, Proust, quantum mechanics, a Zen Buddhist nun, a WWII kamikaze pilot, and a Canadian writer and her environmentalist husband. This, while promising, certainly struck me as an ambitious plan but a writer of great talent, if she were able to wrangle all of this into a cohesive story, may have written an amazing novel worthy of all the superlatives being heaped upon it.

The book also had the good fortune to be paired with a clever designer (congrats to Jim Tierney for the cover) who managed to include all four of the novel’s narratives in a way that is intriguing and evocative; hinting at the content without being too literal.

And finally, there were the opening pages, written in the voice of Naoko, a teenage girl who has grown up in California but has recently (unhappily) returned to her native Japan with her parents.

I have tucked my shoulder-length hair behind my right ear, which is pierced with five holes, but now I’m letting it fall modestly across my face again because the otaku salaryman who’s sitting at the table next to me is staring, and it’s creeping me out even though I find it amusing, too. I’m wearing my junior high school uniform and I can tell by the way he’s looking at my body that he’s got a major schoolgirl fetish, and if that’s the case, then how come he’s hanging out in a French maid cafe? I mean, what a dope!

But you can never tell. Everything changes, and anything is possible, so maybe I’ll change my mind about him, too. maybe in the next few minutes, he will lean awkwardly in my direction and say something surprisingly beautiful to me, and I will be overcome with a fondness for him in spite of his greasy hair and bad complexion, and I’ll actually condescend to converse with him a little bit, and eventually he will invite me to go shopping, and if he can convince me that he’s madly in love with me, I’ll go to a department store with him and let him buy me a cute cardigan sweater or a keitai or handbag, even thought he obviously doesn’t have a lot of money. Then after, maybe we’ll got to a club and drink some cocktails, and zip into a love hotel with a big Jacuzzi, and after we bathe, just as I begin to feel comfortable with him, suddenly his true inner nature will emerge, and he’ll tie me up and put the plastic shopping bag from my new cardigan over my head and rape me, and hours later the police will find my lifeless naked body bent at odd angles on the floor, next to the big round zebra-skin bed.

Or maybe he will just ask me to strangle him a little with my panties while he gets off on their beautiful aroma.

And this is what finally sold me—Naoko’s gift for observing detail and a flair for teenage drama with just the right amount of crazy mixed in. This, I said to myself, is a girl I will gladly follow for the next four hundred pages.

But then… disappointment.

You weren’t expecting a “but”? You feel led astray, you say? Betrayed by my glowing first paragraphs? Deceived by the promise of great things to come? I feel your pain dear reader. For this is just the situation I found myself in as I settled into bed with the “brilliant” novel that was going to be my new best friend for the week only to discover that it is, in fact, a catastrophe. Such an utter and total catastrophe I hardly know where to begin.

A short list of the many, many problems includes: annoying and unnecessary footnotes, dropped plot-lines, a Zen nun who texts on a smartphone (in 1999?!) ponderous lectures masquerading as dialogue, two pages on how to meditate that have nothing to do with anything (except the author’s desire to endlessly impart profound lessons to her readers), a Japanese man who speaks English in a stilted second-language kind of way on some pages and is perfectly fluent on others, a missing cat named “Schrodinger” who may be alive or dead and who ends up in a box (which I may have appreciated if Ozeki could have just left it at that—trusting that her readers are familiar enough with the real Schrodinger’s cat to get the reference. But sadly, predictably, she couldn’t resist instructing us in quantum physics and the Schrodinger’s thought-experiment thus killing her mildly charming idea of putting her character’s real cat in a box), and finally, the use of a long tiresome dream to explain things that couldn’t be otherwise explained because they didn’t belong in the book in the first place.

I’m not even going to bother explaining the various narratives and how they are all meant to fit together because they don’t. The Canadian couple exists only to pontificate about environmental destruction and to be the writers of the annoying footnotes. The Zen nun’s purpose is mostly just to school the reader on Buddhism. The kamikaze pilot had potential, but his story was lost in all the mystical, magical ridiculousness of words and pieces of paper appearing and disappearing.

I wish I could say this seems to be a novel with a few too many ideas that unfortunately just got away from the author. But I can’t. A Tale for the Time Being reads like another unfortunate story destroyed by self-importance run amok. Because Ozeki did have a great story to tell—that of the compelling, original, delightful Naoko. If I had been Ozeki’s editor (and if ever a book needed an editor it is this one) I would have told her to write the entire thing as a YA novel, in the voice of Naoko, and be satisfied with that. I would probably have given it four stars.

Laura wrote this autobiography in 1930, and tried unsuccessfully for many years to get it published; this is the first time it has seen print. As it’s never been through the editorial process with a publisher, one should not expect this story to be polished: it should be enjoyed as merely an initial draft. Much of the book reads like a long letter that a grandmother might write to her grandchildren (in fact, there are many personal notes to her daughter embedded into the autobiography, such as, “You probably remember the dress I’m referring to here”). Instead, one should read this primarily for the extensive and scholarly annotations by the world’s premier Laura expert, and for the historical illustrations, photos, maps, diagrams, etc.

But as an unpublished rough draft, this is surely one of the richest sources of raw material ever: it was the genesis of not only seven Little House books, but also numerous short stories and novels written by Rose Wilder Lane. Yes, while Rose was helping her mother find a publisher, she was also “borrowing” scenes, characters, and events for her own writing ventures. It’s quite shocking behavior from a daughter/editor, because publishers are less inclined to publish material that has already appeared in print. But such is the incredible richness of this material that it not only survived Rose’s poaching, but gave birth to seven separate books, four of which won the Newbery Award. (One book that Rose successfully saw published centered on characters named Charles and Caroline, who grew wheat and dealt with blizzards and grasshoppers while living in a dugout. Laura did not know of this book’s existence until it appeared in print. She was not happy.)

A scene that fills only a few short lines or a paragraph in Pioneer Girl might be fleshed out to a chapter or more in the finished Little House books. Conversely, there is material in the autobiography that was completely left out of the children’s books. And so we arrive at the unpleasant and contentious issue of the “truth” of the Little House books. Yes, Laura lied about a few things. I am deeply pained—even scarred—by a few revelations:

They didn’t keep Jack until he died of old age. Pa gave him away on the Kansas prairie; he wasn’t even with them on Plum Creek!

The Big Woods were not as lonely and massive and wild as depicted.

The Ingalls family was not alone in their house throughout the Long Winter: they were sharing their home with a young married couple with a newborn baby!

But despite the upsetting revelations, I maintain that the Little House books are mostly true. Most of what’s in there exists in some form in the Pioneer Girl autobiography, and a great many scenes are identical, even down to the dialogue. Clearly, the books are slightly fictionalized versions of true stories, not outright fiction. I grew very, very weary of Hill, in her annotations, continually referring to the “fictional Laura” or the “fictional family,” or the “fictional Ingalls,” or “in fictionalizing this scene…” Often I thought if I read the word “fictional” one more time I would lose all patience. Why the relentless insistence that the books are fictional? They’re obviously not! I’m actually far more disturbed by Pamela Hill’s use of this word than I am by Laura’s indiscretions.

I already knew, from Donald Zochert’s Laura and William Holtz’s The Ghost in the Little House, that Laura exaggerated her family’s self-reliance. For example, Silver Lake readers are told that Mary’s college was paid for entirely by the family’s hard work—primarily Laura’s teaching work. The truth is that Mary went to college on a government subsidy: Dakota Territory had no school for blind children, so the territory paid the Iowa College for the Blind. All blind children in Dakota were eligible to receive this. However, Laura and her Libertarian daughter/editor felt that emphasizing the Ingalls’s independence and Laura’s self-sacrifice was critical to the books, so this fact was omitted. I came to Pioneer Girl armed with such knowledge, so I was prepared to learn of a few other similar inconsistencies here and there. This does not make the entire series fiction. Pamela Hill should be ashamed of herself for attempting to brainwash readers into reclassifying the Little House books.

Moving on: Whether or not the 1930 autobiography appeals to you, this is must-read simply for the ancillary material. Three of the photographs are worth the entire cost of the book: there’s a picture of Nellie with her family, and two photos of Clarence and Eva Huleatt, circa 1872. These were the children in the Big Woods whom Laura climbed trees with (she admired Clarence’s copper-toed shoes). The photographs are mesmerizing and the biographical details about what became of people later in life are fascinating. (Nellie’s entire family ended up moving to Portland, Oregon, where they lived until their deaths. Who knew?)

Two side notes:

The cover art is ugly and misrepresents the book. This is a scholarly book and the cover should incorporate some of the original photos.

A few of the annotations it must be said are a bit silly. I didn’t need a description of what a badger is. Another reviewer complained that reading the annotations is like being accosted in a bar by a drunk history professor who won’t stop talking. The situation isn’t quite that bad, but I love the analogy.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, by Michael Booth. Picador (2015), 400 pages.

As a geography-challenged American, the Scandinavian countries have always been bunched together in my mind into one undifferentiated clump of land, somewhere north of Germany, distinguishable only by their resemblance to a trio of limp male members.

My knowledge of the people of Scandinavia, though somewhat less abysmal, has been limited to what I have been able to gather from their authors. I had deduced that the people are comprised of two camps: carefree, nature-loving, innocents (Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson) and grim, depressed, stoic types who shun conversation (Haldor Laxness and Knut Hamsun). Camp grim is also well-represented by Hans Christian Anderson’s children; tragic little figures in hand-knit mittens and caps; ever-stoic and most certainly not crying in the face of near constant tragedy, betrayal, deception and death.

I also know (as do we all) that Icelanders are incomprehensible (Bjork), the Swedes are repressing serious aggression issues (Stieg Larsson and the Nordic crime genre), and Denmark is annoying (Legos and the “Everything is Awesome!!!” song)

That being the sum-total of my Scandinavian education, I was delighted to run across The Almost Nearly Perfect People, written by Michael Booth, a Brit living in Copenhagen and married to a Dane. This insider/outsider status, plus his dry wit make him the perfect tour guide.

Booth’s subtitle suggests that his purpose in writing this book is to debunk our current Everything-is-perfect-in-Scandinavia fantasy—and he certainly does address this, particularly in the chapters on socialism, taxes, immigration and economics. These portions of the book are interesting and certainly useful in understanding how the countries have come to be as they are, but they are not what make it so much fun to read. It is, rather, Booth’s observations on cultural differences that make his story so entertaining.

Scandinavia is officially comprised of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. Booth has added Iceland to the group even though it is not technically Scandinavian, because the inhabitants consist almost entirely of descendants of outlaws from Norway, plus a handful of “Scottish and Irish sex slaves they picked up on their journey west.” Plus, Icelanders still speak Old Norse “a purer version of the Scandinavian languages of the past.” They are, Booth says, “more Scandinavian than Scandinavia.”

Some of the Scandinavian countries have very particular way of socializing (or not socializing as the case may be) and one is well advised to think carefully about one’s own preferences in this regard before impulsively deciding to move there.

If you are a social, humanity-loving type, Denmark is the place for you. Their favorite pastimes include drinking, eating, and communal song-singing. These things must always be done in groups as it is important to be in the company of others. The Danes are zealous joiners of clubs and societies of every kind. The downside of all this heart-warming camaraderie is a thing called “jante,” which means, basically, that one must never try to distinguish oneself from others. Ambition, striving, or goal-oriented activities of any kind will be frowned upon. One must always be laid-back, easy-going, and consensus-driven: A sort of fascism of good cheer and neighborliness, if you will.

For those of you misanthropic depressed loners who would prefer to have your fingernails ripped out with a pair of rusty pliers than to sit through a Danish get-together—there is a country for you. Finland! The Finns are the mirthless, shoulder-against-the-wheel, silently-suffering Scandinavians. The work of their most acclaimed filmmaker, Aki Kaurismaki epitomizes the Finnish character:

A typical Kaurismaki film presents a cast of, essentially, gargoyles, who toil in wretched jobs (coal mining, dishwashing), exchange grunts, and drink heroically. Eventually some of them shoot themselves to death. The end.

This would appear to mirror their auteur’s outlook on life: “I more or less know I will kill myself, but not yet,” Kaurismaki told a recent interviewer.

The Finns’ hard-drinking, angry, suicidal disposition may seem a strange aberration when considered alongside the rest of Scandinavia’s shiny happy people, but it makes perfect sense when you consider their proximity to Russia and the way this has impacted Finland.

A bit of history to clarify: Finland, like most of Scandinavia, was part of the kingdom of Sweden for hundreds of years, but then was ceded to Russia in 1809. A civil war soon followed (which lasted only four months but killed 37,000 people). Finland had barely recovered from this trauma when Stalin decided, in 1939, that he wanted some of Finland back.

The Finns faced certain defeat with only around 200,000 men and virtually no planes or tanks to defend the country against the 1.2 million-strong Red Army. Following a truly harrowing, permafrosted campaign that lasted three months and saw prolonged periods in which the temperature fell below —104F, 26,000 Finnish lives were lost compared with 127,000 Russians.

This brief Winter War was followed by three more years of Russian attempts to invade Finland. During this time, not only did Sweden not come to the defense of its neighbor, it “prevented the League of Nations and the Alllies coming to Finland’s aid.” In the meantime “neutral” Sweden’s economy flourished while supplying both the Germans and the British with war materials.

And in more recent times:

For much of the Cold War, Russian tanks were lined up along the Finnish border awaiting the order to roll. And who would come to the Finns’ aid if the Russians did invade? The neutral Swedes in their hairnets? The demilitarized Germans?

In other words, since 1809 it has been little Finland, alone, who has carried the burden of protecting itself, Sweden, and Norway from Russian invasion and from the same kind of disaster that befell the Baltic states after World War II.

Norwegians are the dirndl-wearing, nature-loving Scandinavians who cherish their mountain cabins, their skiing and their fjords. The Norwegians, Booth says, “are defined by their landscape the way the French are defined by their culture.” They are also among the wealthiest countries, not just of Scandinavian, but of the world, with the second highest GDP of any nation. All this wealth, however, comes courtesy of their newly discovered oil fields, making for a somewhat confusing identity-clash. We’re the Dubai of the North! Norwegians are Green!

Sweden is the largest, most populated, most successful of the Scandinavian countries, but is also, apparently, punctual, law-abiding and industrious to a fault. None of the other Scandinavian countries can bear them. “They are so stiff and boring,” is the common Danish description of the Swedes, “and they don’t know how to handle their beer.” The Finns mock the Swedish men for “egging the Finns on to give the Russians a bloody nose as they fluttered their lace hankies on the other side of the Gulf of Bothnia.” And Norwegians considers May 17 (Norwegian Constitution Day) “a kind of ‘fuck you’ to the Swedes.”

According to Aki Daun, a Nordic ethnologist, the Swedes are “…a race of wallflowers racked with insecurities; they would rather take the stairs than share a lift, he writes. Their more scintillating habits including visiting the countryside, eating crisp bread, speaking in a low voice, and avoiding controversial subjects in conversation.”

* * *

It is not often that a book inspires me to spend hours online researching history, maps, and the proper pronunciation of foreign words. The fact that The Almost Nearly Perfect People did exactly that, in addition to creating in me an obsession for all things Scandinavian is everything a book of this kind can hope for.

*Note to publisher: Add some maps to the paperback edition. The one teeny tiny map you included to cover all of these countries is ridiculous.

Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, by Richard Henry Dana. Signet Classics (1840), 432 pages.

This book is quite well-known and already has legions of devoted fans; my purpose here is to urge reluctant readers to give this a chance. (I’m identifying as “reluctant” people like myself who: (1) hate sailing narratives and (2) are turned off by any and all nautical terms and are subsequently annoyed or confused by the title of the book.)

Two Years was written in 1840 and was a bestseller at that time; Dana became a Harvard-educated lawyer specializing in maritime law who lobbied for social justice on the high seas as a result of his witnessing so many abuses during his time on the boat, and this book led to positive changes for sailors’ lives. Beyond that, it was also widely read during the Gold Rush because it was one of the only books in existence that described California. People preparing to move there in the mid-1840s pored over the book for any advice and information that could help them. At over 400 pages, it is quite filled with descriptions of landscapes, animals, and people, unlike anything else I’ve read.

To be clear, though, it is very much a sailing narrative. I was a child who was unable to read Book 3 in the Narnia series, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (despite loving the rest of the series), simply because of the boat on the cover and the sailing terms in Chapter 2. My advice, if you feel similarly, is to approach Two Years as if it were two books in one: a sailing book and a book about California. Simply skim through the former but savor the latter.

Dana boarded a ship in Boston in 1834 and sailed around the Horn to California, returning home two years later. So there are lengthy bits about head winds, and south-easters, and topsails and whatnot. But—the descriptions of pre Gold Rush California are a must read. He spent seven months moving back and forth between Santa Barbara, San Francisco, LA, and San Diego, collecting and loading cattle hides onto the ship for transport to the east. Again, this is pre Gold Rush…so pre that these places were not yet even villages. LA didn’t exist at all; he refers to it as “pueblo de los Angelos” and he hated it because he had to walk an entire “league” from shore (San Pedro Bay), uphill all the way, to reach the one man in the one house (that was the entire pueblo) who stored the hides. “One night, he burst into our room at the hide-house, breathless, pale as a ghost, covered with mud, and torn by thorns and briers, nearly naked, and begged for a crust of bread, saying he had neither eaten nor slept for three days.” This is typical of Dana’s writing: his descriptions of the people he meets are always lively, detailed, and quite funny. Everybody was eccentric or insane, and he tells their stories with much color and dry humor. A description of one of the native Hawaiians that Dana worked with:

He must have been over fifty years of age, and had two of his front teeth knocked out, which was done by his parents as a sign of grief at the death of Kamehameha, the great king of the Sandwich Islands. We used to tell him that he ate Captain Cook, and lost his teeth in that way. That was the only thing that ever made him angry. He would always be quite excited at that; and say “Aole” (no) “Me no eat Captain Cook!”

Cook was killed by the native Hawaiians only 56 years before Dana’s writing, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that people were already amusing themselves with cannibalism jokes in the 1830s. And it’s interesting to think that if this fellow was over fifty-six years old, he could feasibly have had a bite of Cook as a small child.

There are two sections of the book that are particularly memorable: his description of Dana Point, and his return visit to San Francisco in 1859 (the latter appearing as an afterward that first appeared in the 1869 edition of the book). Dana Point, in Orange County, is named after this author, and visitors to the harbor will find thishandsome statue of a topless Dana staring out to sea with a book in his hand. He has a rather muscular abdomen.

San Juan [Dana Point] is the only romantic spot in California. The country here for several miles is hightable-land, running boldly to the shore, and breaking off in a steep hill, at the foot of which the waters of the Pacific are constantly dashing… The rocks were as large as those of Nahant or Newport, but, to my eye, more grand and broken. Beside, there was a grandeur in everything around, which gave almost a solemnity to the scene: a silence and solitariness which affected everything! Not a human being but ourselves for miles; and no sound heard but the pulsations of the great Pacific! And the great steep hill rising like a wall, and cutting us off from all the world, but the world of waters! I separated myself from the rest and sat down on a rock, just where the sea ran in and formed a fine spouting horn… My better nature returned strong upon me. Everything was in accordance with my state of feeling, and I experienced a glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and romance I ever had in me, had not been entirely deadened by the laborious and frittering life I had led. Nearly an hour did I sit….

Dana visited San Francisco again in 1859, and of course found it almost unrecognizable, writing that he “could scarcely keep my hold on reality.” He is melancholy about it all, while also enjoying the fact that he’s quite famous because everyone has read his book.

The customs of California are free; and any person who knows about my book speaks to me. The newspapers have announced the arrival of the veteran pioneer of all. I hardly walk out without meeting or making acquaintances. I have already been invited to deliver the anniversary oration before the Pioneer Society….

The past was real. The present, all about me, was unreal, unnatural, repellant.

Stargazing Dog was first published in Japan in 2008, where it has sold over a half million copies. It’s a relatively short graphic novel that should take about a half hour to read, except that I had to take numerous breaks from reading to cry. Do not read this in a public setting.

Happie just wants to be by “Daddy’s” side. His favorite activity is to go on walks with Daddy, but just sitting quietly with him is fine too. Happie is a simple dog with honest and straightforward needs; he is not a dramatic or heroic sort of dog. Except that by being this way he does become a hero—to Daddy.

All I knew when I acquired this book was how the story opens (and because this occurs in the first four pages, I don’t feel anything is ruined by sharing it here): police find an abandoned car in a meadow near an overgrown forest road. The man they find inside has been dead over a year; the dog they find inside has been dead just three months.

The first half of the book is told from Happie’s point of view, and the second half is from the point of view of the social worker who is assigned to investigate the identity of the dead man in the car. At first this shift felt like an intrusion. I was pulled out of the story a bit while I tried to figure out who this new narrator was, and I resented him for being an interloper in a tale that had just left me sobbing too hard to keep reading. But the social worker does belong here. He’s a well-meaning and hard-working man who somehow has not yet become cynical or jaded towards his work, but beyond that we quickly learn that he has deep-seated personal reasons for becoming emotionally invested in the case. Other reviews have made this connection explicit, but I’m going to refrain and say only that I cried as much in the second half as I did in the first.

This is a must read not only for the characters and plot but for the artwork too. Daddy’s appearance, as it dramatically changes throughout the story, has a visceral impact on the reader, and Happie’s simplicity of emotion is rendered perfectly.

The Murder of the Century, by Paul Collins. Broadway Paperbacks (2011), 325 pages.

Nostalgia for the past, this book reminds me, is almost always for an imagined past. When I think of how publishing and news “used to be,” I imagine somber, serious, reliable news. I think of reporters and publishers whose interest lay in the “facts” rather than in opinions and sensationalism. And I think of the average man and woman as far too busy getting the crops in and the laundry done to concern themselves with what may or may not have happened on the other side of town.

How very, very wrong I am. The Murder of the Century—a nonfiction account of a gruesome New York murder in 1897, the search for the killer, and the ensuing trial and newspaper coverage—makes clear that our current obsession with scandal (especially the kind that involves sex and death) and celebrity gossip masquerading as “news” is nearly indistinguishable from that of a hundred years ago.

The papers covering the trial ran (much like our current 24 hour news cycle) morning, afternoon, and evening editions so that the public would have access to the unfolding events almost as they happened. Courtroom artists were hired for the speed of their sketches, which were then rushed to a waiting coop of carrier pigeons, strapped to the birds legs, who then flew them directly to the newspaper production offices. The drawings of witnesses were often at the printing presses ready to go before the witnesses had even left the stand.

And the public (clearly not the staid New Englanders of my imagination) ate it up. They fought to get a seat in the courtroom, they pushed their way to the front of the line to be the first to get their hands on the latest edition of the paper, they talked exhaustively and endlessly with their neighbors and co-workers about who the possible murderer was, what the murder weapon could have been, how the body had been disposed of. In short, they were every bit as obsessed with this murder as the public of 1994 was with the O.J. Simpson murder.

What with this particular cast of characters (a public ravenous for gossip, journalists lying, manipulating, and stealing to get the scoop, not to mention the murderer responsible for the decapitating and chopping up of the victim) one would think Murder of the Century would be a bit of a depressing read. The fact that it is, in actuality, a delightful, laugh-out-loud, even charming story is, I think, a testament to Collins’ clear love of humanity. He doesn’t judge these people. He doesn’t criticize them. He is not repelled by the most repellent of characters. He seems to be enjoying them all the way one might enjoy the naughty behavior of a small child. And he does this with such a sparkling wit that it becomes impossible for the reader to do anything but smile fondly along with him.

In the acknowledgements page Collins credits his agent and editor for the idea of expanding his book beyond the story of a murder and trial to include the story of the papers (Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s Evening Journal) that covered it. This is without a doubt the best advice the author could have received, as it elevates his book from a merely interesting story about a murder to a hugely entertaining history of the birth of the tabloid wars.

Murder of the Century is one of the best nonfiction books I have read in years.

EXCERPT:The courtroom tittered, and Thorn smiled quietly while still staring fixedly ahead. The two moved close together until few in the courtroom could see or hear what happened next: a quick squeeze of their hands. It was exactly two weeks since the alleged murder, and the first time they’d seen each other in more than a week. Mrs. Nack leaned in to her lover and whispered.
“Shweige still,” she murmured to him.

Or perhaps she didn’t. A reporter for the New Yorker Staats Zeitung, a paper eminently qualified to eavesdrop on a German defendant, heard this instead: “Halt den Mund und Spricht nicht!” But both messages were the same: Tell them nothing.

“Mrs. Nack and Martin Thorn refuse to talk,” Hearst mused over the proceedings. “All of which is very strange, considering that she is a woman and he is a barber.”

They had already said plenty, of course, as had their witnesses; the mythologizing of the case had begun. Within hours of the indictment, Hearst had a team assembling Journal clippings and reporters’ notes into a 126-page illustrated book titled The Guldensuppe Mystery. The instant book hit the streets just days later, as the first title by the newly launched True Story Publishing Company. Naturally, it heaped priase on the Journal as a “great newspaper” while calling for the miscreants to be electrocuted.

The city followed that prospect so avidly that New Yorkers even attempted trying Thorn themselves. One Lower East Side summer school teacher found that his charges only wanted to discuss Guldensuppe, and he allowed his bookkeeping course to be turned into a mock trial. The result was covered in the Times, which noted that “the bookkeeping lessons quickly dwindled in interest and the full details of the cutting up and hiding of Guldensuppe’s body were gone over by the boys with the greatest relish.” Amid the blackboards and inkwells, “Thorn” and his “attorney”—two eleven-year-old boys—wilted under the aggressive questioning of a roomful of street urchins. Despite an impassioned half-hour-long closing argument by the diminutive attorney, his client was found guilty and sent to the electric chair—which, this being a Manhattan classroom, was simply a chair. School trustees were none too pleased when they learned of this extracurricular jurisprudence. Children were sent back to their bookkeeping texts with a stern admonition from the principal: “I shall permit no more murder trials.”

Flynn is a writer in the mystery and crime genres—two categories I almost never read. Her latest book, however, was described as a psychological portrait of a marriage—a plot I almost always want to read if it is done well. The usual superlatives: “brilliant,” “extraordinary,” “amazing,” etc., were strewn across the back cover, but there was something about the emotion in these blurbs that struck me as more than the customary, fawning quid pro quo. These authors sounded genuinely thrilled by Gone Girl.

I was both surprised and delighted to find the book lived up to these reviews… for the first two-thirds. Unfortunately there is a reversal that takes place at this point that has the effect of undoing all of what the author had been so brilliantly building. Flynn has a real talent for portraying the detailed moment-by-moment psychological complexity behind her character’s thoughts and actions. Her ability to do this is what elevates the plot from what could, in other hands, have been an ordinary read-it-a-thousand-times piece of chick-lit.

It’s not the plot reversal itself that is the problem—the initial turn is actually genuinely shocking and delightful—but rather the way she takes it to such an extreme that the reader can no longer believe in the characters. It is as if we are watching one of Woody Allen’s finely-tuned character studies, let’s say, Interiors, and then half-way through it turns into an axe-murderer/slasher movie. The people in Interiors are simply not the same kinds of people who, seeing several decapitated bodies on the ground, decide to go outside in the dark to see what that strange sound was.

I have spoken with many readers who have complained about the very end of the book, the last fifty pages, when there is yet another reversal, as being unsatisfying and unrealistic. I think it falls apart much earlier than that. By the time that final, final ending comes, I’m not surprised at all because I lost faith in where the author was taking me long before.

This is a review that is painful to write because Flynn is so good at a particular sort of thinking and writing that is not easy to find in fiction. To see her choose to make a one hundred and eighty degree turn into the thriller category, and in doing so reduce her well-thought out characters to two-dimensional cartoons causes me some real anquish.

EXCERPT:Maureen, the tristate’s hardies cancer patient, introduces me to all her friends the same way you’d show off a slightly dangerous new pet: “This is Nicks wife, Amy, who was born and raised in New York City.” And her friends, plump and welcoming, immediately suffer some strange Tourettesian episode: They repeat the words—New York City!— with clasped hands and say something that defies response: That must have been neat. Or, in reedy voices, they sing “New York, New York,” rocking side to side with tiny jazz hands. Maureen’s friend from the shoe store, Barb, drawls “Nue York Ceety! Get a rope,” and when I squint at her in confusion, she says, “Oh, it’s from that old salsa commercial!” and when I still fail to connect, she blushes, puts a hand on my arm, and says, “I wouldn’t really hang you.”

Ultimately, everyone trails off into giggles and confesses they’ve never been to New York. Or that they’ve been—once—and didn’t care for it much. Then I say something like: You’d like it or It’s definitely not for everyone or Mmm, because I’ve run out of things to say.

“Be friendly, Amy,” Nick spits into my ear when we’re refilling drinks in the kitchen (midwesterners love two liter of soda, always two liters, and you pour them into big red plastic Solo cups, always).

I don’t know if there any other novels about abandoned Russian children raised by feral dogs. (If you know of any, please let The Book Shark know!) The fact that Dog Boy may be the only such book in existence is reason alone to read it. Who hasn’t been mesmerized by the true stories of Russian orphans growing up believing themselves to be actual canines? (And why is it always Russia?) We’ve all watched the video of Oxana Malaya barking at the camera and panting in a grassy field, and periodically we read of others (true, many have been proven to be hoaxes, but the 2009 story of the five-year-old from Siberia has been corroborated by a number of news sources).

Dog Boy opens with a four-year-old’s Muscovite’s abandonment in the outskirts of the city, near the edge of the forest. The book has a rather slow pace for the first 130 pages as the child is adopted by a pack of strays and gradually learns how to survive. I have ambivalent feelings about these first 130 pages. On the one hand, the monotony of daily life spent eating, sleeping, and excreting became wearisome, and I worried that if it didn’t stop soon I would have to quit the book. On the other hand, though, I appreciated that Eva Horning was trying to show us—in real time, so to speak—the gradual evolution of the boy’s development through the ongoing minutia that made up his daily life and that finally turned him fully into a dog boy. In other words, perhaps there’s no other way to make his story understandable.

I also tired of the numerous detailed descriptions of eating carrion, which felt at times to be too much gratuitous grossness:

The wonderful rich smell of flesh and viscera rose in their faces. Romochka’s hands slapped and wriggled around the grinding jaws, feeling for the bits he wanted. He worked his hands deep into the cooling innards, feeling over and under the slippery sweetness for gizzard, heart, and liver. He felt the delicious taut globe of the heart and wrestled with the carcass to rip it out. It slipped through his urgent fingers three times, then the threads and sinews gave and it was his. He popped it into his mouth and couldn’t quite shut his jaws around it. He struggled to bite, chew, growl and at the same time feel for the smooth flaps of the liver. White Sister was pulling the intestines away under him. He found the tight juicy ball of the gizzard…. He felt the liver over until he found the gall bladder, bit it off gingerly and spat it to the floor…. He squeezed the grit and meal out onto the ground and settled down to chew through the rich flesh and its rubbery inner skin, spitting out small bits of grit and occasional feathers.

This is just a small excerpt from the pages-long meal that was enjoyed, and there are many other meals of different varieties that are treated with similar depth. How much of this is too much?

Fortunately, the book picks up pace dramatically after scientists enter the narrative. The scientists capture both Romochka and another child to study in the laboratory/hospital, and at this point there was no question of quitting the book. Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that these are not evil, one-dimensional scientists but well-meaning, sympathetic characters who bring a welcome complexity to the narrative. They do not force Romochka to stay against his will, but allow him to travel back and forth via the subway system—a skill that he learned from his dog pack. If you are unaware of Moscow’s subway-riding dogs, I hope you’ll take a moment right now to read this article.

To the incredibly talented cover artist Astrid Chesney: Your art is perfect for this book (in contrast to all the other ill-suited English-language versions).

To Australia: your happy white husky says “an Iditerod tale.”

To Canada: this reads “an adventure staring a happy pioneer boy in 1880.”

To England: are you aware this is not a children’s book?

Australia again: You’ve made this reminiscent of Japanese manga why?

Astrid Chesney probably actually read the book. Her art says: dark, visceral, wild; bleak Soviet housing. The dogs are shadowy figures, not exuberant pets about to go to the local dog park. And the boy isn’t easily seen at first, and then you realize he’s crawling (rather than tromping joyfully towards adventure).

Excerpt:

He knew when the dogs were pleased. He could feel it and see it in the way they used their bodies. Their joyous wriggle and the smile of a sweeping tail were an immediately comprehensible body of happiness. Mamochka’s contented sighs in their bed filled him, too, with bliss. He knew when someone was annoyed, because they bit him. He learned teeth: the friendliness of a gesture that held teeth low and nonthreatening, and slowly all the gradations from bared-teeth threat, lip-veiled threat, and teeth set aside or used for play. He found himself quickly fitting in with teeth serious and teeth playful, reading easily the bodies around him with eyes, fingers, nose, and tongue.

Everything was ritual. He began to emulate the greeting, in which every absence was healed. He made his body joyous too, his head low, mouth small; he helped in delight and licked the mouth corners of the elder dogs as they entered. The greeting was also the moment of all confessions. Body joyous or body contrite, pure of spirit, or guilt-ridden, waiting for punishment. The dogs all confessed truthfully to each other at first meeting, crawling low, with face averted, then rolling over to take whatever punishment was theirs. Usually their abasement was enough. If the puppies had exceeded their boundaries, or eaten Golden Bitch’s bones, or ripped up the bed and spread it around, they told on themselves as soon as an adult entered.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House (2011), 353 pages.

I borrowed this from a friend with the understanding that it is a quiet story about two old widowed people falling in love, which admittedly doesn’t sound terribly interesting. However, my friend spoke enthusiastically of the book’s British sensibility and understated eloquence, so I gave it a chance. To my surprise, within just a few pages I was seized with concern for what would happen to the Major’s family heirlooms: a pair of highly collectible Churchill hunting guns, one of which has been confiscated by the Major’s materialistic sister-in-law. Since I don’t care for hunting guns generally, my concern should be seen as a testament to Simonson’s writing skills.

This is a quiet book, at first, and its tone, combined with very strong, very realistic characters, reminds me of Ann Tyler’s Digging to America. Like Tyler, Simonson focuses on the nuances of family dynamics and what happens when someone from another culture enters the fray. (Digging dealt with American-Iranian cultural misunderstandings; Major Pettigrew is centered on British-Pakistani relationships.)

The sixty-eight-year-old Major was raised in Lahore when it was under British colonial rule; he now lives in an English coastal village that, while relatively sleepy, nonetheless has lots of small-town politics going on, mostly centered around upper-crust fussiness such as proper manners at the local hunting club. His growing interest in the Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali, naturally causes some consternation.

The descriptions of these two people spending time together are delightful. Who knew that old people quietly falling in love could make for enjoyable reading? They stroll through town, there is much drinking of tea, and they discuss their love for Kipling in great detail. I have to say, their conversations about Kipling are written so well that I suddenly felt I needed to go seek out something of his to read—perhaps Puck of Pook’s Hill, which I had never heard of before but which, according to Major Pettigrew, “expresses something important about the foundations of the land.”

The Major bemoans modern society’s loss of tradition and good sense in a very engaging way. His retorts to his annoying family members are clever and sarcastic. And what’s not to love about a book that constantly references “the atrocities of Partition”? Unfortunately, the end becomes melodramatic—almost absurdly so. There is a suicide attempt at the coastal bluffs, a shooting incident during the suicide rescue effort, and even an attempted murder via knitting needle!

Excerpt:

The Major poured them each a second cup of tea and wished there were some way to stop the late afternoon light from traveling any further across the living room. Any moment now and the golden bars would reach the bookcases on the far wall and reflect back at Mrs. Ali the lateness of the hour. He feared she might be prompted to stop reading.

She had a low, clear reading voice and she read with obvious appreciation of the text. He had almost forgotten to enjoy listening. During the dusty years of teaching at St. Mark’s preparatory school, his ears had become numb, rubbed down to nonvibrating nubs by the monotone voices of uncomprehending boys. To them, “Et tu Brute” carried the same emotional weight as a bus conductor’s “Tickets, please.” No matter that many possessed very fine, plumy accents; they strove with equal determination to garble the most precious of texts. Sometimes, he was forced to beg them to desist, and this they saw as victory over his stuffiness. He had chosen to retire the same year that the school allowed movies to be listed in the bibliographies of literary essays.

Mrs. Ali had marked many pages with tiny slips of orange paper and, after some prompting from him, she had agreed to read from the fragments that interested her. He thought that Kipling had never sounded so good.

Time to toss your copy of Zeitoun in your curbside recycling bin; it can land on top of Three Cups of Tea in the corner of the bin reserved for books that don’t even deserve donation to a library because they turned out to be dishonest accounts narrated by shysters.

Yes, this news is four months old, but I just found out recently and wanted to alert Book Shark visitors who may also have missed the story: the “upstanding” and “misunderstood” “hero” Zeitoun has been convicted of domestic abuse. He beat Kathy more than once, but she was too afraid to press charges until she finally separated from him last year (they have since divorced).

Of course we now have to question the veracity of the book, beginning with the portrayal of his personal character as morally upstanding. Readers are asked to believe he was unjustly detained while innocently minding his own business, but why would we trust the word of a man who thinks nothing of smashing his wife’s head against the floor in front of his four hysterically crying children? I’m getting a strong Greg Mortenson-esque con man vibe here. I think we will soon learn that much of the book is made up. Sadly, I think we will even learn that he never brought food to those dogs.